I happened to be at the Kerouac Commemorative public artwork in Kerouac Park at Bridge and French streets yesterday, Jack’s Death Day, where I stopped while guiding a group of 17 arts administration master’s program students from Boston University around Lowell’s historic and cultural district. The flawless blue sky played…
Read More »
Captured this image from LHS Downtown Facebook site. Click on the image to enlarge for easier reading.
Read More »
My friend Juan Carlos Rivera posted this notice on Facebook, which I am sharing here. The people of Puerto Rico need a lot of help to recover from the fierce hurricane that hit them. People are suffering in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, the Virgin Islands—all part of the American family. And…
Read More »
The annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! literary festival is coming up, October 5-9. Here’s the schedule of events. My writing colleague from Somerville, Mass., Doug Holder, sent us this poem by his fellow faculty member at Endicott College, Dan Sklar, who teaches creative writing. Dan’s latest book, Flying Cats, Actually Swooping, was published…
Read More »
What follows is another excerpt from Charlie Gargiulo’s memoir “Farewell, Little Canada,” in which he describes growing up in tumultuous times in the mostly French Canadian-American neighborhood that once existed close to the big bend in the Merrimack River. This is the second excerpt published on this blog, which we…
Read More »
Why are reporters from the N.Y. Times and other media outlets using the term “left-wing” to describe people who oppose racists of all kinds, Nazis, anti-Semites, anti-LGBTQs, christian fascists, and other hate-mongers? Isn’t it the American way to denounce these forms of inhumanity? Isn’t the American creed about pursuing liberty,…
Read More »
The following is an excerpt from Charlie Gargiulo’s memoir about growing up in Lowell’s Little Canada neighborhood in the 1960s during the time when political leaders had targeted the area for wholesale destruction in service of an economic redevelopment policy fueled by government money. The process was called Urban Renewal,…
Read More »
Dave Perry walked around his neighborhood a couple of nights ago and wrote this after he got back home. Our readers may know him as a music journalist and/or the guy who runs Vinyl Destination record shop in Mill No. 5 on Jackson Street in Lowell. He’s also a senior…
Read More »
Book launching for HISTORY AS IT HAPPENS: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass. Saturday, August 5, 2017, 11:30 am to 1:30 pm, at Lowell Telecommunications Corp., 246 Market St, Market Mills, Downtown Lowell. The book has writing and pictures from the first ten years (2007-16) of the RichardHowe.com blog. Forty contributors…
Read More »
Looking through the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times today, I saw a full page ad for a book called “Footsteps: Literary Pilgrimages Around the World,” which is drawn from past travel columns in the Times. The Times is considered by many people as the paper of…
Read More »